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Although people have been publishing 4k camera footage in free licenses before, a Creative Commons release of an entire short animation film in original 4k non-lossy files could well be a world premiere!

Sintel in 4k – 4096 x 1744 pixels – has been made possible thanks to the support of the Cinegrid Amsterdam consortium, a group of research labs, new media and art institutes. The Cinegrid project will explore capture, creation, distribution, screening and archiving possibilities of Ultra High Definition (4k and 8k) content, based on making this technology accessible for a wide audience, such as independent artists, researchers or cultural events.

In the next decade, 4k Digital Cinema will become the new standard for film theaters. The movie industry is adopting this format quickly, but obviously locked up by DRM technology to keep full control over the content delivery pipeline. Blender Foundation therefore is very happy to participate in the Cinegrid project to help realizing an open and accessible 4k production and distribution pipeline as well.

Currently, the film is being distributed to all cinegrid.org partners world-wide for screening, research and demonstration purposes.

The original 4k version (8 and 16 bits per color, tif and png) now is available via the The Xiph.Org Foundation download site too, which is 160 GB of data! We are currently also uploading the 16 bits per color files, 650 GB of data, and which will be finished around 25 February.

Watching Sintel in 4k projection is a breathtaking experience, which you really shouldn’t miss when a screening is happening in your area. We will keep you informed about screenings on shows, conferences or festivals. I already know it will be shown at NAB in Las Vegas, and at Colin’s art college in Savannah.

Thanks,

-Ton-

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on Thursday, February 17th, 2011 at 2:29 pm and is filed under News, Production.
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Thank you for the ETA on the 16-bit version, it makes my life easier. 🙂 And I agree, Sintel looks amazing in 4k. I personally prefer it to the 4k camera footage that I’ve seen; Sintel has some amazing detail in it.

I’ve just posted a version of the 8-bit 4k frames as optimized png files. If you’re interested in the 4k files, you may prefer those; they display directly in the browser, and the collection is 2/3 the size so it’s faster to download and easier on our bandwidth.

Hello there. I’m in the process of creating a digital cinema package (DCP) of this project for everyone’s use. A field in the DCP naming convention allows for a two letter studio abbreviation. What would the studio be for this project? After packing I’ll make the DCP available on our ftp server so people can get a copy.

This will be a full 4K, 5.1 audio Interop compliant DCP that will play in any DCI compliant digital cinema. This is built from the 8 bits per color TIFF source files. I’ll pack a new version from the 16 bits per color TIFFs when those are made available. The DCP specification allows for 12 bits per color movies to be packed.

If someone from the project wants to get in touch, please contact me via my blog or the email I had to enter to post this comment. 🙂

@Adamus1red We’ve done that for a few of the file sets in the past, but I don’t plan to for the Sintel files. We’re low on server space, and our mission is to provide clean sources for codec developers and as such a minor technical hurdle isn’t inappropriate. I suppose it depends on your toolset, but with shell scripting I find it much easier to download and verify the files separately.

Chris Eller: Cool, it’s fun to hear what people are doing with the data!

@Ton
Thanks for publishing a revised sintel-hd.avi. Great to see some of the issues where corrected. But it seemes some new where introduced.
I recognized some strange light-blue spots in one scene on the roof and also on the wall behind the right shoulder of sintel. They are also in different resolution frames – for example:

As an update, there is a problem with frame 00008699. It causes the DCP pack to fail with a scanline read error. I can open it properly in Photoshop CS5, but the OS X Finder just shows a blank white frame. I’ll try re-saving it from Photoshop. If someone can figure out the issue with that one frame and replace it in the archive, that will be nice.

I found out about Sintel by talking to a friend who watched it – and I was impressed. Such a high quality as an open movie project… you guys are great!

A few months ago I sent an email to someone on the “About” site… I think it was Martin Lodewijk, but I’m not sure anymore. I wanted to know if there’s a chance to come across a version of the film with all the sound effects, but without the score (which is great!). I intended to practise composing a little. The occasion of getting a film without music, but with dialogue and sounds is very, very rare and I thought a project like Sintel would be the right place to ask for such an opportunity.
I meant that only for practising, not for publishing anything!

The answer to that mail was to visit this site regularly and check if something like that is announced.
Since then, nothing happened – so I thought I could ask again.
Is there any possibility to receive a copy of Sintel without the music track?

Well, no matter what the answer to my question will be: Keep doing such a great job, guys!

I’m not sure what the problem with the frame was either. I opened it in Photoshop and re-saved as a TIFF. The DCP packed successfully in about 4 hours. I’ll do a test screening to make sure everything looks and sounds good before uploading to our FTP server. You’re, of course, welcome to grab a copy for your own archives and server for downloads. I should be able to test and upload if successful sometime Monday.

Omigosh my video card can’t even play the 2k version 🙁 Then again, maybe it IS time to upgrade from XP to 7 😛 Looks awesome, but like I said, it would never play on my system, let alone would I attempt downloading it on my broadband card…

Nevertheless I’m sure there are a bunch of good frames in there I could pick out for my desktop wallpaper 😀

The DCP version of the 4K Sintel at 8 bits per color is packed and checked. This is an InterOp packed Digital Cinema Package and is playable in any DCI compliant digital cinema. It is not keyed or encrypted and is re-released according the the CC 3.0 license of the original.

This is a directory containing six (6) files. You’ll need all six of them for the DCP to be valid. There is also a TAR archive available for ease of downloading. If someone wishes to mirror the DCP, please do so and enjoy.

Most modern D-Cinema media blocks can read a USB hard drive or thumb drive formatted for: NTFS, HFS+, and EXT3 filesystems. You can’t use FAT32 for this as the largest file, the video essence, is far larger than the 4 GB file size limit under FAT32.

When the 16-bpc version is available, I’ll pack that into a DCP as well.

@Ton & Ralph Giles
Errr… Looks like my comments were killed by antispam… *sigh*… Well, sorry guys, but you didn’t fixed this frame (00008699.png / 4k): take a look on neighbors frames: they are bigger and a bit darker 🙁

About the Sintel Anti-Banding Edition:
Not perfect, but less banding. No random noise, so 2.5 times as much bitrate as normaly required in order not to loose too much visual data. Credits not changed.
A little sharpness added too.
1920×828 @10000kbits, 2.0 audio and a few subtitles included.
Video: 1,03GB Audio: AAC 65,2MBhttp://thepiratebay.org/torrent/6201625

Ohhhh…… I see someone said there was a 2K 3d version there???? Can someone upload this to youtube as a 3d version??? Youtube should then change it to whatever format the user sets (eg stereoscopic) Just as long as its decent quality 🙂